The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle is another book I found via Scalzi’s Big Idea. If any author’s are wondering if writing up a Big Idea piece and getting it on Whatever is a good idea, I would have to say yes–I’ve picked up a number of books that caught my attention there.
In The Alchemist of Souls, Lyle’s main stage is Elizabethan England, but with a couple twists. The big twist is that when the America’s were discovered, the European’s found a more advanced non-human species (called Skraylings) on the east as well as human native Americans. The non-humans serve as an effective buffer to colonization and provide the rest of the twists in the world. Since history is different from the point of contact, differences in history start to make their appearance. For example, Queen Elizabeth was married and has several children. The Skraylings seem to have some abilities that seem like magic to the Europeans. The English need allies against the Spanish and French and so downplay any hints at “deviltry” at work.
With those background details, the main thrust of the book concerns the arrival of the first Skrayling ambassador to England and the appointment of Mal Catlyn as his bodyguard. Mal, Ned (his friend) and Coby (a girl hiding out as a boy in a London theater company) provide the POV characters and are done quite nicely, I thought. Lyle does a good job at showing the motivations and background for these characters. She has a real feel for making the characters authentic.
I enjoyed reading this book and I look forward to the next volume.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett was Hammett’s second novel featuring the Continental Op. This book is basically three short stories tied together with common characters and the unfortunate happenings to the “Dain” family. I read this back on my flight from Rome. It worked OK in that role as it was short and fast.
So far, Hammett isn’t growing on me as quickly or as well as Chandler did when I read through his novels. Out on the internets I see lots of people extolling Hammett’s prose and plotting, but I’m not really seeing it so far. The Op isn’t particularly likeable. The end story in this one was supposed to tie things together, but the result was one of those invented endings where it looks like Hammett wanted to tie things together and just fit the ending to make things work out. There wasn’t anything really leading to that ending. The dialogue speaks very much like many movies from the forties. You can hear the inflected accents as the actors try to be earnest. I’m not sure that’s a really good thing.

For my first new Hugo review I will point out The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City by John Scalzi. This short story appeared on April 1 of 2011 for the very good reason that it was an April Fool’s prank. Scalzi talks about the genesis of the story here. Basically, Tor had wrapped up their “Best Books of the Decade” voting and had done some statistics on the frequency of words in the titles here. In that post, they suggested that a trilogy with the titles:

The Shadow War of the Night Dragon, Book One: The Dead City

The Shadow War of the Night Dragon, Book Two: Dark Blood Magic

The Shadow War of the Night Dragon, Book Three: Dream World of the Fire Wolf

would be the most generically titled (and frighteningly possible) set of titles that could be arrived at.
With that list in hand, Patrick Nielsen Hayden called Scalzi up and asked him if he would be willing to write the prologue of the first volume for their April 1st funness. Scalzi (cackling with maniacal glee I can only imagine) accepted.
The story itself is a wild bit of fun. It has humor–high, low and meta. And, hey, it’s got evil badgers with spoons of darkness–how can you not like that?

Addendum:Here is a link to a hilarious reaction video of Mark Orshiro reading the first portion of “Shadow War”. It is made extra amusing by Mark being unaware that the story began its life as an April Fools prank.

The nominations for the 2012 Hugo Awards were announced on Saturday. Minicon happened to be one of the sites doing a live feed of the nomination list, so I got to hear these live and in person. I was fairly pleased as a number of the works I nominated made it to the final ballot. Here are the lists with links to reviews I’ve already done:

Last weekend was Minicon 47 and it was another interesting weekend spent among SF fans and authors. This year I was on two panels. The first panel I was on was on Friday night and was “Failing the Turing Test.” Co-panelists were: Ted Chiang, Aaron Vander Giessen (M), Andy Exley, Howard L. Davidson and Jason Wittman. Ted Chiang (in case you don’t know) was the writer Guest of Honor. I enjoyed being on this panel quite a bit. We had a lively discussion on whether the Turing test was still useful (yes) and if it had been passed yet (no — chatbots really don’t count as the human involved isn’t usually aware they are being tested.) I mentioned some ideas about the ethics of AI — if you have an entity you acknowledge as intelligent, what sort of rights should it have. Ted mentioned that voting is problematic — “What if it replicated itself 10 million times?”

The second panel I was on was Saturday night and was “What is Intelligence?.” The co-panelists were: Ted Chiang, Jason Wittman, Marissa Lingen(M) and Martin Summerton.Ted talked a bit about ideas of intelligence taking different forms and I mentioned Blindsight by Peter Watts as a good example of a book dealing with different kinds of intelligence. (Ted agreed.) Ted brought up Transcranial direct-current stimulation tDcs as an interesting example of mental augmentation that is going on. At the very end, Ted mentioned that he wished we had been able to talk more about ethical implications of super-intelligence. He mentioned that we don’t expect dogs to have many ethics, children to have a few more, adults many more, … So would we expect a super-intelligent entity to have more ethics? (With great power comes great responsibility.) After the panel I had a chance to chat with Ted for a bit (he’s a really nice guy.) I thought the idea was quite interesting and seemed reasonable. While we might expect higher ethics, it is, of course, no guarantee that any given entity will have them Just as adult humans vary wildly in their grasp of ethics. Also, there is the problem that an AI could hold a very different type of ethics. Like “mine iron!” might be its idea of the highest ethical goal.

In a later panel, Ted gave an interesting definition of SF vs. Fantasy. If the basis of the story operates via the scientific method–is reproducible without special circumstances then the story is SF even if it may appear to be fantasy. For example, Ted’s story “Seventy-two Letters” has golems animated by slips of paper with names in Hebrew written upon them. This might appear to be fantasy, but the difference is that anyone can write out the names and animate the golem. Thus (in that universe) it is a verifiable and reproducible result. No special status of “wizard” is needed. I thought this was an interesting definition.

Minicon 47 is this weekend. The Guests of Honor this year are: Ted Chiang (author), Christopher J Garcia (fanzine), and Frank Wu (artist).
I will be on two panels this year:

FRI — 8:30PM Failing the Turing Test
In 1950, Alan Turing asked the question “Can machines think?” Since then, the test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour has sparked new questions. Is this test useful? Is it significant that some people are fooled by chatbots? What’s the relationship between intelligence and personhood? In what ways are computers smarter than us? How have AI surpassed us, and what do we do when humans don’t pass? Ted Chiang, Aaron Vander Giessen (M), Andy Exley, Howard L. Davidson, Jason Wittman, Steven Halter

SAT — 7:00PM What is Intelligence?
Ted Chiang’s “Understand” asks and then attempts to very thoroughly answer the question of what it would really be like to be super-intelligent. Along the way, it delves into the definition of intelligence, and whether greater intelligence necessarily means greater morality. What’s our current definition of intelligent? What is intelligence? Is our definition something that could evolve? Could we achieve super-intelligence with performance enhancing drugs? What would it mean to be super-intelligent? Ted Chiang, Jason Wittman, Marissa Lingen(M), Martin Summerton, Steven Halter